Parent College Coach Tip #9: Revisit and Reconsider

For seniors, college acceptances are rolling in. Some won’t be receiving the “Congratulations, you’re accepted” notification. For any student, it’s a tough pill to swallow. For a parent, it’s even tougher. We don’t like to see our children have to deal with disappointment. But the reality is that even the best of students might not get an offer of admission from their first choice college.

What do you do next? Revisit and reconsider. Revisit the colleges further down on the list and encourage your student to reconsider why those colleges were on the list in the first place. Upon deeper inspection and further investigation, it might be possible that those colleges are more than just second best. One or more of those schools could be a better fit academically, financially and socially. By revisiting, he could discover something that slipped by in the earlier visit. By revisiting, he might look at the college in a completely different light — if they want him, maybe it’s best to go where he is wanted.

To sum it up: sometimes, our first choices aren’t always our best choices. And when it comes to taking a second look at the colleges further down the list, one of them could be “the one” that might have got away.